Freeze-Frame: Time And Vision In Three Early Welty Stories

Eudora Welty's early short stories provide a fitting career transition from photographer to writer. In particular, her creative figuration of time--enriched by her employment of photographic vision--graces her earliest collection, A Curtain of Green. In this paper, I apply a critical approach based on the narrative theory of time by Paul Ricoeur to discover meaning in three of those stories: "A Curtain of Green," "The Key," and "A Memory." Using Ricoeur's proposition of three mimetic stages--prefiguration, configuration, and refiguration--and taking the liberty to peer through the camera lens, I identify a unifying theme of feminine emergence that finds its definition within Welty's stop-action narrative style.